A nation rich in shame

Published 9:01 pm, Wednesday, September 14, 2011

America's politicians are forever reverting to platitudinous speculation about what sort of country we'll leave for our children. What they really need to do is make amends for the shameful state of America today.

Tuesday's report from the Census Bureau about a rising rate of poverty and a decline in median household income is an indictment of a political and corporate culture that has allowed the very rich to prosper at the expense of everyone else.

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Read it, and demand that what's supposed to be a representative government take measures to ease the hardship that's a painful daily reality, to one degree or another, for the majority of Americans.

Fifteen percent of the country now lives in poverty, as the government defines it. That means 46.2 million people live in households that must make do on just $22,314 for a family of four. Seven percent of the country, some 20.5 million people, lives in such abject poverty that their household income isn't even $11,000. These, incidentally, are among the people who Republicans in Washington complain don't pay their fair share in taxes and should have more "skin in the game."

And what's left of the middle class?

Median household income is down again, by 2.7 percent from last year, to $49,445 in inflation-adjusted dollars. That's lower than it's been in 17 years, just before the booming economy of the 1990s really hit home. Oh, for the pre-recession days of 1999, when median household income reached a high of $53,252.

That's when America was working, of course, in an economy that had achieved what the experts define as full employment. Now, though, comes fresh evidence of what it means when 25 million Americans are desperate for full-time work and 15 million have no jobs at all.

The status quo is failing. The pervasive thinking in Washington, where the Republicans opposing President Obama have seemingly as much power as they did in the days of George W. Bush, is exposed as incapable of helping anyone but the very rich.

Oh, they've had a setback, of the sort that the rest of us can only envy. Income is down for the top 10 percent, by all of 1.5 percent from 1999. That, remember, is the portion of the population with a median household income of $139,000 that controls about 85 percent of the nation's wealth.

For the bottom 10 percent, income is down by 12 percent since 1999.

For everyone in the middle, life with underwater mortgages and no health insurance is all too common.

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THE ISSUE:

The poverty rate is soaring. Incomes are falling.

THE STAKES:

A return to greater, and more widespread, affluence requires a different kind of governing.

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They need help, these people of both dire means and ordinary means, and they need it now.

They're not the people who should be expected to bear disproportionate sacrifices, not even as the country tries out dig out from under a $1.3 trillion budget deficit. Nor are they the ones who should be asked to pony up as the country seeks the additional tax revenue essential to that task.

Tax cuts for them might be nice, as the President is proposing. Jobs would be even better, as he is demanding. A reasonable share of the nation's wealth is what's critical.

They are the casualties of a country in decline. They are why a decade's worth of economic policies as misguided as they are unfair needs to be abandoned.